


(To be Deleted) The Elysian Asphodel. (A Hades and Persephone Story, Part 1)

by DefiantCandle17



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Action, Awkward warrior god, Byronic Hero, Epic mythology retelling, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Grey skinned Hades, Hades and Persephone Mythos, Huge fan of the couple and huge inspiration- dark and light romance, M/M, One shot developed into longer story, One shot that might develop into larger story, Persephone with red hair, Romance, Slow Burn, Something I came up with during a walk, Summer To Autumn, Violence, Wholesome Romance, Yearly reunion, badass female characters, coming home
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:29:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21693067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DefiantCandle17/pseuds/DefiantCandle17
Summary: I have no further intention of writing any more stories so this fic will be deleted within the next few days.
Relationships: Hades/Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 59
Kudos: 174





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Kate Cthonia's work- check out her works on FF.net and her books on sale on Amazon! Receiver of Many and its sequel Destroyer of Light are the titles of her books.
> 
> This is a transfer from my original upload on Fanfiction. I'm going to be transferring most of my work over to here and uploading solely on Ao3 from now on!
> 
> I've given this the m rating for the slightly explicit description and chemistry during the kiss.

Curling her autumn red hair over her right ear, Persephone sat in the field, surrounded by flowers.

Nearby, a grand oak tree stood sentinel in the meadow where she sat.

Adjusting her robe, Persephone, also named Kore, daughter of Demeter, and the goddess of the spring eternal, sat in comfort and quiet solitude.

She had seen her mother off on a hunting trip with her satyrs and nymphs, going after the great elk for a feast to celebrate the harvest season.

And also, subsequently, her annual departure to the Underworld with her husband Hades, also named Aidoneus.

She sighed and brushed a strand of copper red from her brow.

She saw a butterfly, an orange winged beauty with black stripes and white spots in its fluttering wings. Smiling, she lifted a finger and beckoned to it with a pulse of flora and life from her very being.

The butterfly felt it, and it changed direction in its flight to come to her. Persephone offered up her right finger, and the butterfly alighted on her knuckle above her nail.

She giggled at the touch, the ticklish feel of the butterfly's legs on her skin.

Then she felt him.

He was hidden behind a tree on the other side of the field, but she knew he was there. She could always tell when he was near.

She looked up at the place he was hiding, and as if on cue, the dark god emerged.

He was dressed for war. His grey arms were bare, and his helmet was horned with two steel horns curving downwards. His face was concealed under his helmet, and even his eyeholes were concealed in shadow.

He wore his armoured sleeveless cuirass, carved, steel grey and ornate in its design. He didn't wear his cape, and his legs were covered in armour, with a protective leather covered kilt on his hips. His legs were covered with thigh-protecting plates, a dark onyx colour, that protected his shins and the tops of his sandals,

In his appearance, he was quite terrifying. Just like he was when they first met.

"Has the time come already?" Persephone spoke, returning her gaze to the butterfly flexing its wings on her finger.

"Yes." The dark god replied stoically. His voice was an ominous rumble that sent a chill down her spine, and she suppressed a shiver. Of adrenaline, perhaps?

She was sat surrounded by bluebells and dandelions, and the air was alive with the sounds of birds and insects chirping amongst the brush in the forest around them.

He was early…but she couldn't fully blame him.

"I'm glad I got to see Mother off this morning." Persephone spoke with relief. "I hate leaving without saying goodbye."

The armoured warrior was silent for a moment, before speaking.

"I am glad too." He then appeared to hesitate, before speaking. "I can…help find her so you can say a proper farewell, if you wish."

"No, it is fine." She assured him. "I know how busy you are, and how you don't like being up here for too long."

"I do not mind." The dark god insisted. "If you wish to say goodbye to your friends, I can-"

"Aidon." Persephone interceded without taking her eyes off the butterfly. "It is fine."

She lifted her hand and raised it up, signalling that it was time for the butterfly to move on.

The insect complied, and Persephone smiled as the butterfly took flight and fluttered away into the field.

A rustle and scraping sound of metal made Persephone look up.

He was coming towards her.

Persephone sighed, and brushed the pollen and the seeds off of her dress.

She would miss this world, and knew what came when she left. But she was happy also with Hades when she left with him. It was joyous when she left with him, even if her mother never fully approved, and it was joyous when she returned, which Mother did approve of.

She stood upright, feeling the blades of grass caress the soles of her bare feet. Pushing her hair over her shoulder so that her shoulders would be bare, and turned to the snap of a twig to see the dark god standing over her.

Hades stared down at Persephone. Imposing. Powerful. Foreboding.

 _What must he think of me, so small and bright and colourful compared to he_? Persephone could not help but wonder, as she studied the magical glyphs carved here and there on his helm and his breastplate.

"Hello." She spoke.

The first word she said to the imposing warrior, when they first met.

How terrified and uncertain of him she was when they first met.

How relieved and safe she felt when he proved to be the opposite of everything her mother warned her about him.

"Hello." Hades replied back, his response muffled by his helm.

Persephone smiled, a gentle curl of her lips.

Hades then appeared to snap out of his state, his movements short and quick as if he remembered that his helmet was still on.

Then he lifted his hands to his helmet, clasping his fingers about the intimidating helm, and pulled.

He removed his helm, and a short brace of shoulder length obsidian hair tumbled out of it.

His face was lean with good cheekbones, and was pale and grey like the rest of him. His eyes were yellow, with the faintest trace of brown in them. Wolfish, yet warm and reassuring in their steady gaze.

Persephone's eyes were blue with a tinge of green, and her skin was pink and pale with freckles about her cheeks and arms.

He needs a haircut, she mused as he drew his tongue across his lips. Nervous.

The fact that Hades was always nervous around her was maddeningly endearing and incredibly romantic. The depths of which he valued her, shown in his shyness around her even to this day…

"Persephone…" The dark god began. "…I."

But that madness did nothing to abate her desire for him.

Standing on her tip toes, Persephone lifted her hands to his face and pulled him down to a long, loving and affectionate kiss.

The sipping embrace of their lips, the strokes of her lips upon his, the moaning noise she made him make warmed the very cockles of her heart with a sordid thrill deep in her chest, pooling at her core…

_By the stars I've missed him…_

His breath against her face as he broke momentarily for breath only increased her ardour, and she kissed him again, hungrier and deeper.

Months of longing. Waiting. Dreaming of him.

To know now that he had dreamed of her and missed her too…

They broke again for air, and Persephone nudged at his nose with hers, teasing him that there was more where that unrestrained show of built-up desire came from.

His eyes were wide with surprise and raw love, and Persephone giggled and squinted at how much affection there was for her in those eyes.

Then before she could say anything, his strong, scarred arms lifted and wrapped around her, pressing her against him, making her gasp wantonly at his hard armoured body pressing into her soft unprotected own.

"Hades…" Persephone gasped. His skin was cool from the evening air, and yet deep down felt warm and relaxing to the touch. His embrace…

"Kore…" Hades spoke.

"Sshh…" Persephone calmed him with a gentle hushing noise, lifting an hand to his face and caressing his cheek. She brushed his broken nose with a brush of his lips.

"I'm here…" She assured him.

His eyes seemed to take all of her in. Measuring her and seeing her for what she truly was. Dark eyes that pierced from gloom and darkness and made her the safest woman in the heavens and the underworld.

"I love you." He spoke.

Persephone's heart always came undone everytime the brooding, contemplating warrior god of the underworld showed his vulnerable side. The side where his emotions, as obscure as the shifting pools of the Furies's lair, surfaced from underneath his stoic veneer, and devastated her soul with the rawness of his fire for her.

"I love you too." She replied, smiling and feeling her eyes begin to water with unshed tears.

_My Aidon. My protector. My love…_

"My husband…" She finished.

"My wife…" Replied the God of the Underworld.

She smiled at that. Knowing she was his and that he was hers.

"Let's go home." Persephone spoke.

Hades nodded, and lifted his grey hand to comb through her coppery hair.

"Cerberus missed you. He's getting excited because he's picked up that you're coming back. And it's getting harder for me to keep him by my side." He mused with feigned annoyance in his voice.

Persephone giggled. She really loved Hade's three-headed guardian hound.

"That's because he knows his mummy is coming home, and he knows where his true allegiance lies." She cheekily replied.

"Does he, now...?" Growled the dark god, fiddling with the strands of her hair.

Persephone lifted her head and kissed the right side of his chin.

"Let's not keep him waiting…" She whispered.

Hades hummed in approval, the noise of him vibrating through the entirety of her soul.

Breaking apart, Persephone lifted her left hand, and Hades picked up his helmet and held it under his left arm, and grasped her thinner, smaller hand with his larger own.

And they walked back to where his chariot awaited to ferry them back to the Underworld, where they would dwell for the months of autumn, and the months of winter, which followed everytime the Goddess of Spring departed from the world, hand in hand with the god that she loved.

Together.

* * *

You have no doubt heard many versions of the tale of Aidoneus Hades, Lord of The Elysian Fields and Tartarus, and of how he came to meet Kore Persephone, Daughter of Spring, and Goddess of the Harvest, and take her to be his bride.

But you have not heard this one. The version where Persephone and Hades knew each other before she became the Dread Queen to rule by Hades's side. Or the epic struggles and conflicts they faced, both apart, and together, in order to secure a future in which both could be happy. 

Perhaps, should you chose to listen, you may come to believe that this version, the version where all is not as it seems, where the Olympic Pantheon of Gods and Goddesses are more human than they appear in the myths and legends, and where treachery can come from anywhere and anyone. Where life is nothing but an endless game of chess played for vengeance and spite by the capricious heavenly overlords, where god and mortal alike are used as pieces, while foreign entities seek to disrupt the delicate balance of power in Ancient Greece, when gods and demons and other monstrosities walked the earth.

Perhaps, you may come to believe that this version is true. 

That is because it is.


	2. Prologue: The Titanomarchy Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Titanomarchy enters its final stage, and Demeter leads the charge to rendevous with Hestia and Hera, while awaiting the reinforcements brought by Zeus, Poseidon, and another ally who lurks in the shadows...

_For the past ten years, the Titanomachy, the war between the Titans, the old rulers of earth and heaven, and the new gods, the Olympians, has raged in the once green country of Thessaly, in the Northern Region of Ancient Greece._

_Both sides have maintained a stalemate, with neither unwilling to give any quarter. For their price was sovereign rulership of all within the earth made by the Titaness Gaia, and the sky, fathered by the Grand-Sire Ouranos, now deposed and exiled._

_Kronos, leader of the titans, son of Ouranos, and father to the Olympians, has been silenced by an act of trickery by his wife Rhea, to save her children from the bowels of his stomach. At the base of Mount Othrys, he has lain in slumber for the past decade, thanks to a potion created by Metis, a titaness in alliance with Rhea._

_Kronos was warned that he would one day be supplanted by his own children, and so sought to destroy them, only to be deceived and his usurpers freed by the now leader of the Olympians, Zeus._

_It is here, on the slopes of an erupting Mount Othrys, that one last final battle is to be fought for the right to rule all of the realms. The titans, led by Atlas and Menoetius, have rallied at the base of the mountain, where they hope to awaken their fearsome leader. They have time and numbers on their side._

_And Metis’s potion is about to wear off…_

_***_

Mount Othrys bellowed and spewed fire into the sky.

The skies roiled with darkness as ash was spewed into the sky by the explosion of magma, and from the clouds, chunks of burning stone, fired and thrown through the air by the volcanic eruption, fell like meteorites upon the desolate burning land before it.

Struck by clubs made of oak from the band of titans perched around the side, and conjured by the fire-wielding titan, Prometheus, the dark mountain had been undergone so much duress that it had erupted long before its time, providing the savage titans with an arsenal of burning rock and a poisonous cloud of ash and soot to use at their disposal.

A salvo of earthbound volcanic rock arced through the air and shrieked towards Demeter’s forces like a hailstorm of arrows.

“Shields!” Demeter, appointed goddess of the harvest and the spring earth in bloom, and commander of the Olympian ground forces consisting of dryad archers, satyr infantry and rock giant shieldmen, bellowed her command. The forces followed her word, moving in unison. The rock giants, hulking composite entities with boulders forming their bodies and smaller rocks constituting their arms and legs, lifted their left circular arms in front of them and squatted. The satyrs lifted their oak carved shields beneath them, and the dryad archers ducked under them in a flurry of flower braided hair of varying colours, shades of green comprising their skin colours, flashing in contrast with their hair as the shower hit.

Demeter took her eyes off her forces. No time to focus on whether they all hunkered down in time. She looked up at the incoming storm, closed her eyes, called on Gaia’s blood, the blood of the earth in her very veins, clenched her fingers and felt the earth beneath her legs. She did not kneel to touch the earth, but reached through the tendril of thought and power that was within her as was given to her as Gaia’s chosen heir to the earth.

She pulled and lifted her arms, her fingers curled as if clutching wet earth. A massive wall of stone, dirt, vegetation, root and tuber and thick tendrils of vine and ivy sprang up, dwarfing even the immense rock giants behind her.

 _Hold…please, damn it, hold!_ She prayed to no-one other than herself and her strength. Her powers were still new, nascent abilities manifesting in her, still raw and new to her, even with her control over the earth as a goddess, but ten years of throwing up shields of dirt and rock, hurling spears of stone and disembowelling demons with her vines had given her experience, if not an amateur level of confidence in her own abilities.

“Brace!” She yelled. And the salvo of burning rock hit.

Each missile, great and small, burned as it hit her shield. Every single one. She felt each brand of flame devour into the wall she had conjured, feeling it through her body. Sweat poured down her forehead, stinging her eyes under her domed helmet and gathering under her pits below her exposed arms.

_Hold…hold!_

The lesser stones splintered into bouts of flame that blossomed and licked at her shield. And the stronger, heavier missiles burned through and punched through her hastily erected shield like heavy rain through rotting leaves.

She heard and tried not to wince at the sound of the burning stones hitting her forces behind her. They were only a small group, numbering one hundred in total, and any loss no matter how small could be potentially be devastating in the game of numbers that the titans led by leagues upon leagues. Demeter handpicked her forces herself because they were the best and had proven as such time and time again over the course of the bloody ten years. Each death she had felt since then was as deep a loss as a limb or a bone ripped from her body. Like her, they too were of the earth, of the blood of Gaia.

No loss, no matter how recent or old, seemed to grow easier to bear with time.

She heard the rock giants grunt and snarl, their bright eyes and stony jaws clenched as they bore the brunt of the missiles that got through. She heard the grunt and yells of pain as some burned through the massive shields of the rocks and into the armour of the satyrs behind them. And then, with shocking horror yawning wide and deep in her stomach, screams cut through the air, bit out by the dryads, along with the satyrs as the lava-bathed rock burned into their flesh.

More stones struck against her wall and cut through it like razor sharp hailstones, and as they petered off into silence and gentle, blunt patters against her earth born shield, there was the sound of screams and wails of pain. Pain arose in a dissonant choir of screams of agony, wails of grief for those who survived yet lost those dear to them, and furious, obscene curses from the survivors whose grief gave way to vengeful fury at the titan’s latest attack.

“Melane, Melane, wake up! Wake up!”

“My eye! One of them’s got me- my left eye, it’s gone!

“Titan Bastards! Zeus and Poseidon are gonna show you your guts for this!”

“Hera will crush your balls, you fat tyrants!”

“Fuck you! Fuck all the titans!”

“To hell with Kronos!”

“Crissus! Crissus, stay with me please!”

“May a vulture chew on your liver forever, Prometheus!”

“He’s dead! My lover Crissus is dead, no…”

“I will avenge you, Melane, by the stars and the sea, I will make them pay!”

Demeter slowly dropped the earthen shield, the immense wall of upturned roots and stone and mud subsiding and kneading back into the earth. She clenched her eyes shut, gritted her teeth to stem the latest tide of sobs ready to break free from her mouth from yet another horror that the war had inflicted. She had to steel herself. Steel herself with the resolve that without her and her men, the Olympians would have one army less to help aid against the Titans.

“Gaia’s Blood!” She turned and addressed her men, gritting her teeth in a war-like expression to mask her expression of grief for the good people she had lost today. “We must push on. Honour the dead by avenging them on the titans!”

She lifted her right hand and called from the earth a single stem of mighty beech, formed and grown in the span of seconds what would normally have taken the rooted plant months to grow. It lifted and twisted into her palm, and in its narrow trunk, cradled by the spiralling wood, a jagged narrow flint of iron, crushed and carved to form the spear tip, giving her a weapon forged by the literal earth. She hoped her shield of enchanted bronze, along with her cuirass, and her sturdy, padded kilt along with her dark bronze helm, would be enough to see her safely through the day.

“We need to meet up with Hestia and Hera at the front! We have no choice. Leave the dead. We will bury them when the war is done.”

At the sound of hushed whispers, and moans that could easily hide discontent, freshly stirred by the sting of sudden loss, she maintained her composure, feeling her heart beat with adrenaline as she raised her voice. “Zeus is not far behind with the Cyclops and the Hecatonchires, and once Poseidon arrives with his chariot, the fire of Mount Orthys will be smothered! They will have no weapons to throw at us like the cowards they are!”

She was answered by the earnest, bloodthirsty bellows and cries from her loyal forces. Men, women and people of all sexes and colours in the races of earthborn children and beasts who loved her and would die for her. And would die for the redemption of Gaia’s honour, slighted by the cruelty of Kronos, inherited from his cruel father Ouranos.

She lifted her spear aloft, pointing it to the sky as she rallied her forces at the top of her lungs.

“We push on! Today, we claim our right to rule from the Titan despots, and heal the world that has been wounded by this cursed war! For Zeus! For Rhea! For Mother Gaia! For Olympus!”

The roar of giants, satyrs and dryads was enough to nearly deafen her, and turning towards the smoking mountain, Demeter threw her spear forward and cried out!

“To the front! Charge!”

She ran, her goddess-born strength keeping her pace ahead of her forces as they rumbled like a storm of sandals and spears and swords behind her. There was a rise before her, crested by a wall of burning pine trees and smoking grass.

She ducked her head under her bronze shield and charged on, ready to meet whatever the hell lay behind the wall. She may not be a natural fighter, or lust for battle as Poseidon and Zeus did, but she would die for the dream that was Olympus, the heavenly home at the top of the mountain that was the Olympian’s chosen home, and for the dream of lasting peace in the realm.

So through the burning leaves she charged, grateful for her helmet protecting her braided auburn hair, tied into knots behind her ears and down the back of her neck, and when she had advanced enough, waving the burning branches and needles from her shield and shoulders, she peered out from behind her shield.

A vast host of stone giants, tree beasts, serpents, bears, lions and elephants, and smaller soldiers, shaped like men fashioned entirely out of bronze and silver, was before her, surging and roaring in a sea of noise that washed over her. Demeter’s heart hammered in her skull, and she nearly faltered at the sight. The ground forces, recruited and built by the six gods with the help of the titans and titanesses loyal to their cause, were fighting for their lives, against a sea of what appeared to be ash grey beings of varying and troubling sizes and dimensions. Their eyes, mouths, chests and anywhere not covered by their dismal sheen of soot glowed with blood red, fiery blood.

Magma demons. Prometheus and Epimetheus had gone too far in their conjurations and craftmanship inherited from the mother of creation that was Gaia. The titan’s choice of location with the once peaceful and now active volcano made dire sense. A vat of fire, linking to the boiling blood of the earth and the magic spellcraft commanded by the most potent of titans provided a near limitless amount of brute force at the titan’s disposal. They could overwhelm the six gods and goddesses and their forces entirely without having to spend any effort on their part.

 _But why?_ Demeter’s mind burned with alarmed questions. _They are stronger and larger than us!_

She put them aside as she heard her forces yell and catch up behind her, already knowing the answer to the question the moment she asked it. In war, one used any and all advantages they could employ, no matter how easy the victory may seem. This brute force would provide the Titans with time to strengthen their already terrible power while the Olympians would exhaust themselves whittling away at the grunts being thrown at them.

They had to cut through them and punch a line through to the bottom of the mountain. Kronos, the titan father of the Olympians, was still asleep, but rumblings in the earth had warned her that the potion Metis had fashioned was beginning to weaken in its effect. It was this message through Gaia’s whispers, that had prompted Demeter to insist to Zeus that they strike now, or Kronos would rise at his full strength and crush the smaller force of Olympians like gnats with the Titans under his command.

If they could capture or kill Kronos, the titans would be inspired to surrender at the demoralising sight of their leader felled by his own children. Shame or death, this war had to end by Kronos’s defeat today.

“Gaia’s Blood, we push through! Cut a swathe to the front! Protect as many as you can!” She yelled back at her army. “Charge!”

And beating fear down in her heart, Demeter led the charge to reinforce the beleaguered army, towards the front line.

There was a hulking bear in front of her, shaggy and brown furred, standing with its back to her on its mighty hind legs and roaring, lifting its paw to swipe at something in front of it.

And a burning, black blade hissed through the air, biting into the great noble beast’s side, severing it in half. In its place was a snarling, hissing demon, built like a spindly bastard child of the stone and of the molten lava that gave it life. The whole of it, if it were not so animated, appeared to be a grotesque statue of a man, if it were fashioned by a demented artist who saw man as more of a beast than a being. Its skull was squat and rounded, like lumps of poorly moulded clay piled on top of each other, and a single ridge cut down both sides over its eyes to create a frowning face marred with hatred. Its entire body seemed hollow, with red hot fire in liquid form composing its inner body, partially protected by its spiny, coarse outer shell.

It saw her and opened its mouth, its noseless face revealing its hollow mouth with no tongue, but a screaming pit in which boiling flame bubbled underneath.

Demeter yelled and thrust her speartip forward. The jagged tip punched clean through the demon’s open maw and burst out the back of its head in a bloody shower of fiery red blood. The demon’s screech was cut off abruptly and replaced with a series of desperate, gargling chokes, before Demeter slammed the nailed rim of her shield, thick and ornamentally decorated with the relief of entertwining vines and lotuses in bloom, into the demon’s face, ripping her spear free at the same time.

The demon collapsed in a heap on the floor, and Demeter roared and dove in to the melee.

Arrows whistled past her and struck the burning eyes and necks of the demons ambling towards her with their crude notched swords and axes, blazing with a burning edge that would likely hew her to pieces if she gave them half a chance. Her dryad’s arrows had hit their mark. A quick glance behind revealed to her that the satyrs, armoured with only their cuirasses protecting their upper bodies, leaving their goat legs exposed, sprinted foreward slammed into the magma demons that had gotten past her head on. Metal scraped against burnt stone and ash as the satyrs slammed into them with their shields before gutting them and hacking at their squat heads with their short swords.

A rumbling to her left made her flinch and duck behind her shield, only to see that a rock giant, so tall that her head only came up to its waist in height, had lumbered into the fray, and with its right three fingered hand, snatched a magma demon in the middle of its leap by the throat and proceeded to slam it down into the earth. This unholy fusion of fire and earth was an affront to the giant made of stone and woven branches, and its small eyes glowed with white hot rage as it lifted and slammed the howling magma demon back on the ground until its head burst like an overripe orange blooded fruit.

“To the front!” Demeter roared, and struck the next demon’s face so hard with the back of her shield that it snapped its head all the way around its shoulders.

Her spear thrust and struck and cracked the skulls and bodies of the flimsily crafted demons before her. The tip and haft dribbled with bright burning blood, and she worried that the spear might snap and fail being bathed in so much hot liquid. Yet the spear held, and her own forces gave her plenty of room as she span the spear around her head, cutting through and beating back the thick of the magma demon’s army.

She hacked and struck and thrust through the guts of the forces, but there were so many, and she feared that her charge had been a foolish gambit. Then, over the sea of snarling, screaming red eyed and grey faced beasts, a reddish streak of light, red and bright yet not as bright as the magma demon’s blood, shot through the air. Demeter recognised it immediately.

“Hestia!”

_I’m coming, sister!_

Her distraction nearly cost her. She felt a sharp tug on her shield, nearly jerking her arm out of its socket. Pain spiked from the frayed joint. She nearly stumbled as a demon, brutish and stocky in its poorly crafted stout profile, gripped the rim of her shield and pulled with the force to either rid her of her shield or the arm carrying it. Demeter had the shield secured by two vine straps, her hand holding the farthest grip while her forearm was looped through the gap.

She let go, hissing as the coarse straps scraped across the skin of her arm. The demon fell back and threw her shield to the side, lumbering towards her, along with two other magma demons of similar size and bulk.

Demeter had no shield, but she was far from defenceless.

She gestured to the earth, her intent focused and her will at one with Gaia’s. She lashed across her face, and a green slip of green, laced with crimson thorns, surged from the ruined bloody earth and slashed across the lead demon’s eyes. It faltered and stumbled to its knees, clutching its ruined eyes as orange blood trickled through them.

Demeter gestured again, swiping her hand to her left at the second demon. The green thorny whip lashed through the air and through the demon’s face. The impact sent it spinning off its legs and it landed on its back, clutching at its throat and choking as its entire lower jaw was cleanly severed from its hideous face. The third was on her, and Demeter sidestepped its lumbering charge, ignoring the biting cutting pain in her left side as the beast’s claws raked through her left side, easily rending armour and cloth.

Demeter snarled and threw her left hand forward. The thorny vine surged forward and at the clutch of her fingers, snaked around and caught the demon’s throat in a sure and terrible bind. The vine tightened at her command, and the thorns bit into the crusty skin of the demon’s neck. The demon’s rage filled roar turned into desperate, short high-pitched squeals. Demeter pulled her hand back. The vine whipped back, ripping the magma demon’s skull from its shoulders. Orange blood spurted from its small neck, its fingers clutched at nothing, before it fell to its knees.

Demeter didn’t bother to find her shield. Instead she kept moving. She headed towards the source of the red streaks of directed flame, and ran a demon through the back of its neck. She pulled the shaft loose, the demon fell-

-And a pale skinned goddess wearing a white cloak, protected by a cuirass spattered with orange and dark blood, with sandy blonde hair, wild green eyes and a wide, soft arm holding a glowing red nimbus of hearth flame stood before her.

“Gaia, I nearly got you- Deme!”

Demeter heard the crunch of a heavy foot on the cracked earth below and acted on instinct. She threw herself to the ground on her right side as the goddess flung her hand forward, casting the fireball directly at the attacker behind her. She looked up in time to see the fireball connect and obliterate the head of the demon about to run her through.

“Fuck.” She could only curse in her relief as the headless magma demon fell backward, clawing at nothing but the air.

“Swearing doesn’t suit you, Deme.” Said Hestia, whipping a lock of sand coloured hair behind her eyes with a toss of her hair and reached a sturdy hand down to her. Demeter took it and was pulled to her sandalled feet.

“Where’s Hera?” She asked, scanning the throng of demons. There were less here, but they moved faster and seemed to move with more zeal than the melee of demons she had passed through. As if they were fresh to the fight.

“She was-” Hestia turned to speak, and saw the newest troupe of demons. Too late, Demeter realised, both had distracted each other long enough for the newer demons to catch them off guard. Hestia lifted her hands, cradling a small ball of crimson light, Demeter lifted her spear on instinct but realised she should called on her powers-

-before an arrow, made of celestial light punched through the closest magma demon’s skull.

Amongst them, another goddess soared through the air and landed on one knee, holding a golden, ornately decorated bow, carved like the feathers of a sun bird. She wore, to Demeter’s shock, a rippling white peplos, a chiton robe that left her slender arms bare, with enough fabric to fold over the shimmering gold girdle at her waist and fall down to her feet. It whirled around her legs as she span, drew and nocked another glowing white arrow from her quiver and let loose. Another demon fell, halted in its charge with an arrow painfully wedged through its face. The goddesses’ brunette hair was bound in a tightly woven bun at the back of her head, but it appeared to already be frayed with loose hairs whipping about her scalp here and there as she slew another, and then another with her flawless aim, death flashing in her golden eyes and her snarling, perfect teeth. Her bow twanged and her arrows hissed through the air, striking the demons in their skulls, throats and chest.

 _Hera_. Demeter’s mind drew up the name, and she shivered at the name. She was always nervous around the self-appointed queen of the Olympians and promised bride to Zeus for many reasons, and her deadly, murderous archery skill that laid to waste the charging twenty strong pack of screaming demons was one of them.

But today however, a more troubling reason that made her very guts tremble arose just as sure as any recent memory would. She could only watch as Hera ripped one arrow out of her latest kill, then spin and jam it into the bowels of the second that came for her. As it fell wheezing to the ground, another barrelled towards her. Demeter looked at Hestia, who was just snapping out of her spell-bound state to conjure her next fire ball, and glanced back at Hera.

Hera saw and reached for her quiver, only to clutch at the air. Her lean, haughty features took on a wolfish ferocity that made Demeter’s heart lurch, as she looked at the demon, and thrust her hand forward. Her eyes- Demeter could see, even from here, that their pupils had thinned into serpentine slits, glowing brighter than their usual splendour.

Two swirling scaled shapes lurched from her outstretched arm, twirling through the air and latching onto the demon’s throat. Their bite, for Demeter could see their exposed fangs was so potent that it halted the creature in its tracks, and it clutched at the throat, gargling and rasping for breath. The fangs of the snakes that Hera had conjured did their grim work, and soon the demon was on its knees, black froth bubbling up and dribbling from its mouth. It fell to the ground and rolled on its back, its legs twitching as the venom paralysed and killed it in seconds.

As quickly as they appeared, they vanished, leaping up in streams of golden wisps into Hera’s outstretched arm. Her slit pupils returned to their normal shape.

She turned and saw Hestia and Demeter, scowling mostly at Demeter. She stormed towards them, gesturing with a twisting motion of her right hand. There was the sound of metal scraping against rough, shell-covered flesh as the arrows wrenched free of their targets bodies and glided in unison, back into Hera’s quiver.

“What the hell took you so long? This assault was your idea and yet you are one of the last of us to show!” She snapped at Demeter, and she snapped out of her fear-stricken reverie to reply.

“Iapetus ambushed us with boulders at the enclave while we made preparations.” Demeter explained. “We had to fight him off and then go through hailstorms of fire before we could reach you. This is all I could muster.” She glanced back at her forces. They were fighting bravely and sheltering the wounded of Hestia and Hera’s forces with their shields and their arms, but more rock giants and satyrs and dryads seemed to be enveloped in the storm of blood-stained demonic claws. They were giving it all they got, but the advantage of numbers that the magma demons, manufactured and built at an alarming rate, was beginning to exhaust her forces as well.

Even the fuel of revenge for the dryad family killed by Iapetus’s cowardly hurling of boulders would see its limits tested today.

Hera’s chest rose and fell as she breathed heavily, her cheek muscles hardening as she glanced at their combined forces battling the demons borne of Mount Othrys. Demeter glanced back, and with a careful squint, she could make out holes like the burrows of mice and badgers, each one glowing with a flickering, foreboding orange light. They had been pouring out from there, and from the looks of the tunnels, another horde of demons was approaching.

“Where is Zeus?” Demeter turned back to Hera as she asked her question.

“I heard a whisper from Gaia.” Demeter replied without pause. “Zeus went to Tartarus to free the Hecantonchires with the Cyclops carrying his lightning bolts in tow. He should be here any minute.”

“You and our grandmother…” Demeter easily heard the derisive, almost dismissive tone in Hera’s voice as she turned, not looking at her and instead up at the erupting mountain. The magma that had spewed forth was beginning to descend down the face.

“Peace, Hera.” Hestia gently chided, continuing to play the peace-maker in the group. “Demeter’s forces came just in time. We were nearly overwhelmed.”

But Hera wasn’t listening. She was looking towards the base of the mountain, hidden by the wall of dust and smoke thrown up by the battle and the demon’s advance. They were leagues away from the foot of the mountain, and they needed to get there to reach the slumbering body of Kronos.

“Zeus isn’t here.” Hera spoke, a decision firmly made in her voice, filled with resolve. Demeter’s heart lurched at what was about to happen, as deeply implied.

“Hera, you cannot be thinking…” Hestia tried to speak.

“We go for Kronos now, or at least buy Zeus and our brothers time enough to bring what they need.” Hera spoke, drawing an arrow from her quiver and nocking it to her magnificent golden bow.

“I’ve been waiting for a chance to take that baby-eating monster’s head for years now.”

“You won’t be able to get close enough! Zeus’s thunderbolts are the only weapons strong to slay a titan and we need Poseidon’s water to…” Hestia tried to insist, but Hera would have none of it.

 _But do you charge for glory, or for the love of Zeus?_ Demeter could not help but wonder.

“Men! With me! Any of you too tired to go on but can still swing a sword, stay and finish off the stragglers! The rest of you, keep the next wave away from us. We go for Kronos and take the bastard’s head!” And now it was Hera’s turn, as it usually always was, to lead the army of Olympian loyalists in Zeus’s place.

“For Gaia!”

The wave of noise behind her, with roars from the beasts and shrill war cries from satyr, bronze man and dryad alike swept over Demeter like a great wave, and she turned and beckoned at her own forces, those she could see that were still standing.

“Those able, join with Hera and Hestia’s men! With me! Hurry!”

And on foot, they charged. Lumbering bears accompanied by sprinting golden lions and snarling wolves bounding at lightning speed raced ahead of the bronze and silver men, with the satyrs and dryads behind and the rock giants, battered and cracked from a thousand claws, lumbered behind alongside the wide-aired elephants, filling the roaring sky with their deafening bellows.

The next wave of demons came later than expected, and were felled by the beasts leaping on their throats. The rest were taken by the sword and spear and arrows lancing through their heads and throats. They fell in mere seconds, and Demeter followed Hera and Hestia while a few of the soldiers and beasts finished off the survivors.

Soon, the charge brought them to one last rise, where Mount Othrys lay just beyond. They scaled the mountain.

They had not gotten ten paces when a reddish light enveloped them. Demeter looked up and her stomach bottomed out, as she saw, spiralling towards them like a splinter of the sun, a massive fireball, streaming yellow flames that gouged through the black clouds as it streamed towards them.

Demeter reacted. She curled her fingers into the earth, feeling hard unyielding stone that in the span of seconds, she would have to make yield. She saw Hera lifting her bow, trying to aim and shoot down the fireball before it hit them, and she moved, lifting her hands to shove Hera in the side and to the ground.

“Behind me!” She yelled and raced to the front.

Gripping the stone, feeling it crumble and forcing it into an uneasy break, to yield to her untested and already exhausted strength, was a fool’s errand. Her impulsive side had won out and landed her in trouble again, she bemoaned to herself.

_As long as I am the only one to pay the price._

The fireball roared closer. Demeter yelled and pulled her hands up, feeling the strain on her muscles, fibres straining and ripping painfully under the immovable force that she was trying so hard to move.

The stone gave, as did something inside her, she could not tell which, and a vast wall of stone, crumbling, held together by her tenuous hold of the earth, rose up, blotting out the glaring light of the fireball.

Demeter and all around her were blanketed by darkness for one whole second.

Then the fireball hit, and the entire wall exploded in a roar of fire and stone being unmade, so bright and loud.

***

Demeter came to. Lying on the ground. Her ears were ringing, and all other sound was muffled, as if she was held underwater. There was blood in her mouth, running down her nose, on her lips, her tongue.

She looked around. Her vision failed her, but the distinctly coloured shapes were undeniably that of bodies. Smoking. Charred. Her poorly thrown up defence, Hera’s charge…They may as well all be dead or dying right now.

Demeter saw a massive, groaning shape rumble past her, shaking its tusked head. An elephant was on fire. Another staggered by her face, the double jointed black furred legs of a satyr. She smelt burnt meat and the acrid smell of burning hair as he burned.

_A fool’s errand…I’m so sorry…Gaia’s Blood…I’m so…sorry._

The earth rumbled under her back. A single tremor. Like the footfall of what could undoubtedly be a titan.

She turned her head, towards the inferno of red light, and wished that she did not. Walking towards them was a huge behemoth, shrouded in flame, but not so that its blackened shell, a skeletal frame that consisted of a black, imposing chest, wide, burly arms, and a skeletal face with curved horns like that of a bull.

_A magma titan…Prometheus…you bastard…_

It opened its mouth to roar, and its muffled bellow and the hellish sight before would sear itself in Demeter’s mind for as long as she would live.

It stepped closer. It could either crush them under its foot, or burn them by simply breathing on them.

There was no escape. She was about to die, having failed to protect the female members of the Olympian six and their armies. Even the realisation that her death would mean denying Zeus and Hera her secret gave her no pleasure. In her barely conscious, nightmarish haze, all she could do was lie and watch as the horned, burning titan lifted its hand, hissed and began to form another fireball in its hand. No shield of earth hastily thrown up could shield them this time.

_Mother…Grandmother…forgive me…_

Her hearing began to return, and the hideous, hair-raising snarl of the magma titan echoed in her ears.

As did the sound of something whooshing as a blur of bright steel caught the light of the titan as it sped towards its massive grinning skull, and struck it with enough force that the crack of the unknown blade piercing its skull seemed to echo throughout all the world.

The impact and effect was instantaneous. The titan stumbled back and howled into the air, clutching in vain at the strange metal object that had been flung into its forehead. The fireball it conjured sputtered out, roaring into the air as the magic controlling it shook free of its control. Its wreath of flames then began to subside, the great flaming light surrounding it like a hellish mockery of the light that surrounded Zeus, flickered, subsided and died out. leaving only a dim, fleshy orange skin and the charcoal black husk of the titan.

It tottered, swaying on its feet, then, leaned back and began to fall.

As it began its descent, the object lodged in the titan’s skull wrenched free, trailing bright orange blood, and like Hera’s arrows, span and shot backwards through the air, spinning towards her with a will of its own,. From the distance as it was, Demeter could swear it looked like a sickle, but as it drew closer, it was clear that it was more like a massive scythe, spinning towards her.

A pale, muscular arm shot out in front of her, outlined as a shadowy, sinewy limb before her. The scythe, now to Demeter’s realisation that it was enormous, almost as tall in its handle and long in its vast blade as any god, reached the hand, and slammed home into its palm. The impact pulled the hand away from her sight, and she felt the brush of air as the blade came within inches of touching her, whipping across her ruined hair.

Ignoring the surprise that her helmet had been lost, Demeter looked up with the last of her fading will to stay awake, up at the man responsible for slaying the magma titan.

All she could see was a man, garbed in the same armour as the other gods and goddesses were. His helmet, an imposing face covering helm that left only the eyes exposed, shielded the man’s face from her sight. The helm had downward curving horns, one on each side. His kilt was made of dark plates of metal held together by a web of grey cloth, and he wore sturdy greaves to protect his shins and metal plates across the top of his sandals. His cuirass was grey and dark, lined with finely carved, fluted designs in its obsidian forged metalwork.

His eyes…Demeter realised. They were red…glowing red, like some kind of demon…or worse…

The titan before them hit the ground with a rumbling crash that finally shook Demeter’s grip on reality and her senses. Her last vision before the wave of dust stirred up by the falling brute struck her in the face, was of the helmed dark warrior lifting his scythe to his side and planting the base of it to the ground, as sure and as inexorable as death itself.

 _Hades…_ was her only and final thought, before she drifted away into darkness, the noxious fumes of fire and blood and death sweeping her away with a waft of its sickening aroma.


	3. Prologue: The Titanomarchy Part II

***

Aidoneus Hades lifted his hand and blinked to shield his eyes from the wave of dust that swept towards him.

He planted his feet and bent his knees, waiting for the impact. To his relief, the dust cloud only mildly buffeted him where he stood, and only when the winds died down did he lower his hand.

The magma titan, a new atrocity made by Prometheus and his half-witted brother Epimetheus no doubt, no longer moved where it lay prone on its back, having caused a small quake from its fall.

_Good. For all their terrible power, these titan spawned abominations can still die. That is all I care to know of them._

His thoughts turned to Demeter, Hestia and Hera. The volcano roared behind them as the titans stoked the fires of the mountain, illuminating the hills before its gargantuan presence in a murky, reddish light. Hades had to squint to detect the living amongst the dead, but looking down at the female body by his feet, he recognised the head of bound dark reddish hair atop a slender chin and a thin nose with blood trickling from both down the side of her face.

_Demeter!_

He turned and knelt down by her side, dropping the scythe, so he could clasp both sides of her face.

“Demeter! Wake up! Demeter!”

He let go of her face and ripped the strap securing his helmet to his chin open, and removed his helm. He felt the pervasive heat of the air wash over his sweaty scalp, felt his black hair fall down the back of his neck after being caught by the rim of his helmet, his beard and moustache scrape against the visor. Setting it down, he grasped Demeter’s face and turned his head to listened to her breath. Shallow, weak, and her skin was warm. She was still alive.

“Demeter! Can you hear me! Demeter!”

“Hades!”

Another woman’s voice rose up from the groans of the dying and injured nearby, and Hades looked up to the sound of rustling kilts and armour to see Hestia, her blonde hair sullied by black mud as she ran towards them.

“Deme!” She cried out and fell to her knees, revealing cuts and scrapes on her exposed knees.

“Can you…” Hades felt foolish for asking straightaway.

“Yes, move.” Hestia took Hades’ place and placed her hands, her left fingers interlocking atop the back of her right hand over Demeter’s breastplate. She closed her eyes, swaying a bit, before her eyes glowed with fire. Not the fire that spewed from the air, but fire that burned warmly and safely in the dark of a cold night.

“ _Hearthfire warm, hearthfire bright,_

 _Guide and bring her back home to the light_.”

She pressed her hands hard against her chest. Demeter’s body jumped where it lay, and the harvest goddess’s eyes opened wide. She surged upright from where she lay, coughing where she sat, wheezed, then spat out a wad of blood. She wiped the back of her hand across her lip then looked at Hestia then Hades.

“Hera…where’s…”

“I’ll look for her.” Hades stated. “Can you move?”

“I…I don’t know…I can try…” Her voice croaked as she spoke, and she swayed lightly where she sat. She was likely concussed.

“You are in no condition to fight.” Hestia assessed her correctly. “I’ll get the survivors something to carry you out.”

She placed a warm hand on her shoulder. “You did well, Deme. You saved so many of us.”

“Not everyone…how many…?” Demeter tried to speak, her eyebrows furrowed and her eyelids thinned as she appeared to try to weep.

“Rest now.” Hestia placed a hand over her brow. Something passed from her hand to Demeter’s brow that made the hairs on Hades’s arms stand up, and Demeter passed out with a gentle moan, her lolling head caught by Hestia’s arm. The Goddess of the Hearth laid Demeter down gently on the earth, before looking back up at him.

“I saw another titan. Menoetius. He came down and grabbed Hera when she tried to carry on without us. I couldn’t go after her. I only lived because of Demeter’s magic and…” She trailed off, her full lips pierced as her tremulous voice bit back a sob.

She looked at him with her eyes red and shimmering with unshed tears. “It doesn’t matter. Too many have died and I need to heal our forces. If you are here…”

“I understand. Take care of them, Hest.” Hades nodded. “I’ll find the Queen.”

He stood, taking his helmet and sliding down over his face, tightening the small leather belt strap under his chin. “And I’ll bring her home.” His voice rumbled under the muffled wall of his faceplate.

Hade’s helmet left his ears exposed, and he could hear from the burrowed holes in the mountain, some larger than others, the rumbling sound of many feet and screeches of the fiery denizens scrambling over each other to pour out like vermin.

“If Zeus doesn’t get here in time with reinforcements…” Hestia had seen as well and began to voice her concerns.

“I’ll worry about that.” Hades assured her. “And I did not come alone.”

He turned around to where he had come and at the top of his lungs, cried out as loud as he could with his rough, gravelly voice.

“Gigantes!”

A chorus of deep, thunderous roars, the sounds of brutish men as tall as small mountains, answered his rallying cry. The ground shook with the sound of heavy footsteps, not as deep as the magma titans, but heavy enough to make Hades stumble slightly where he stood.

With a loud cry, the armoured bodies of the giants, their helmets clumsily welded from black iron and their broad shoulders covered by scraps of the same metal, leapt over the mass of bodies and over Hades. Their stink of sweat and dirt filled Hade’s nostrils, making him curl his lip in disgust. Barbarian monsters, made from the blood of Ouranos when Kronos castrated him. Nothing but purely male, giant testosterone fuelled beasts. Beyond the urgency of this battle, Hades could see no other value that the brutes held as they thundered towards the base of the mountain, swinging their knobbly iron clubs and thick blades about their heads.

“Alcyoneus!” Hades barked.

One of the larger ones, carrying what Hades could only describe as a sort of hammer, halted in his tracks, looked around to identify the source of the voice, then found Hades glancing up at him.

“Hades!” The giant boomed, and lifting his fat fingered hand, pushed up his helmet to reveal a grotesque face with cracked teeth and leering, intelligent eyes. “A fine day! I though Zeus would be the one to lead us to battle.”

Hades broke into a lope and called the scythe into his outstretched hand. It flew from the ground and slammed home, the feel of the wooden handle a familiar and reassuring presence, especially with the roguish giant he was addressing.

“Keep an eye out for Hera. One of the titans has taken her.”

“Ah…Hera.” The giant’s voice boomed with a tone of such obvious lechery that it made Hades’s skin crawl with revulsion, and he was glad his helmet concealed his grimace of disgust. “Is it true what they say, that she has the face and body, truly fitting for the Queen of Gods? Zeus is a lucky man-”

“Your men, if they find her,” Hades interrupted. “…are to rescue her and bring her back intact. Lay a finger on her and you will answer to Zeus. Or worse, me.” Hades ensured that a deeper growl worked its way through his direct threat.

“Of course…whatever you say, Hidden One.” Alyconeus grimaced, before slotting his helmet back over his face. The crudely hammered and dented helmet left his eyes, nose and the middle of his lower face exposed, and he rose his head up to give a booming roar.

“Lads! We have a Queen to save! But not one of you try anything funny, or you’ll have me to answer to!”

Hades rolled his eyes. Pure, face-saving, arrogant testosterone.

“Hear that, lads! We get to be the heroes who save Hera!” Another giant’s voice, higher in pitch and even more vile to listen to then Alyconeus.

“For glory! For Hera!” Another bellowed. And with that the rest of the giants, a variety of builds and heights and armament, some with their chest covered and others with their rippling, pudgy torsos exposed to the air, broke into a sprint, kicking up dust and dirt where their filthy, heavy feet crashed into the earth around him.

Hades slowed to a walk, letting the giants rush onwards to their doom. The prospect of rescuing a goddess, even one as shrewish as Hera, excited the mercenary dogs. Perhaps in their blundering charge, with their blood flowing elsewhere other than their heads, another potential threat to the Olympians along with the Giants could be extinguished in one day.

He had stopped however, because Zeus was meant to be here right now.

_Where in Tartarus was he?_

A rumble of thunder shook the skies, and a flash of lightning, bright and violet against the dark shadowplay of the ash clouds choking the sky drew Hades’s gaze.

Then, with a greater peal of thunder, a bright flashing light pierced the ash cloud, and Hades had to squint and shield his helmed face again. When he looked up again, the light had mercifully rescinded, and the being responsible for the phenomenon of light became visible for all to see.

Zeus, the last born and the first born, he who was saved from being swallowed by Kronus by Rhea and Gaia’s plan to swap his newborn body with that of a stone. He who was taught the ways of the world and how to see into the hearts and minds of gods and mortals by the titaness Metis, and was the brightest, perhaps, the most powerful of all the gods. He who now commanded the weather, the sky and the storm, now rode a chariot drawn by four bright horses, fine stallions with great feathered wings like swans or doves, descended from the darkened sky.

Behind him, stepping on clouds that formed and disaparated when their feet left them, was three large, bulky cyclops, clothed in wild thick furs around the waist that covered their hips and upper legs, and stretched also across their left chest. Hades knew them also. While they varied slightly in height and other features like ears, nose and general corpulent profiles, the rotund one-eyed monsters each cradled a brace of glowing, jagged spears, brimming with steadily glowing light.

_Thunderbolts…so the artificers managed to capture lightning after all…_

The cyclops, named Arges, Steropes and Brontes, followed their leader in his chariot down to the ground. They were each several metres taller than the Gigantes, and easily outmatched them in strength and weight, but not so in wit. Yet the fur-clad island dwellers had proven in the past to be tireless workers, terrible in fury when roused and ideal caretakers and sheep-herders.

Zeus tucked the reigns under the crest of his chariot, shaped like that of the letter Omega, hooking the leather straps onto the downward facing spokes, and stepped off.

As he did, he took in his left hand his aegis, a golden shield, said to be inlaid in the back and rim of the skin of the goat Amalthea who suckled him when he was a babe. A grim way to honour the old goat who passed away by the time Zeus reached his young adulthood, Hades could not help but wonder. The boss of the shield bore a strange, frowning face, with serpents snaking out of the sides of its face, and wings expanding wide behind the unsettling image.

Zeus wore no armour, and that made Hades grit his teeth in disapproval. He wore instead a white finely woven robe with an embroidered cusp that draped over his left arm, leaving his right chest, shoulder and muscular arm bare. His full hair was long and dark, with his skin pale yet seemingly radiant. His beard was long and was joined by a moustache of prominence, adding more to his fatherly, lustrous looks.

Yet in his eyes was the quality Hades could not help but detest. In his blue eyes with dashes of earthy colours, brown and green, there was not a trace of concern, or even humility. This was the look of a man who was fed by the milk of Amalthea and the mana of the ash trees on Crete, tended to and sustained on every need and whim by the Meliae, the beautiful nymphs of the island.

And he had all the princely, entitled arrogance to show for it, glowing, godly radiance be damned.

Because his first days were not spent in the darkness of a titan’s stomach, battling squirming monstrosities that sought to digest him and his brothers and sisters in the rumbling, wet, stinking darkness.

“Now, my brother, the battle is set to be won.” Proclaimed Zeus with a smug smile on his lips and spoken in a magnanimous tone that only drove the wedge of resentment deeper into Hades’s heart. “Because I, Zeus, the liberator of my brothers and sisters and defier of Kronos, am here!”

“Tell me Brother.” Hades spoke, not losing a step and refusing to indulge his little brother’s ego by basking in his presence, gaping like a fool as all did when they lay eyes on him. “Were the weapons you had the Cyclops forge worth your delay, that could have spared the hundreds of lives fighting for us this day?”

Zeus’s proud smile immediately withered under the blow of Hades’s deflating statement, and he seemed more annoyed rather than regretful of the fact Hades had presented to him.

“Such is war. Without the delay, our one-eyed brethren-“ He gestured to the lumbering giants behind him. “-would not have had time to perfect the weapon that will win the war.”

“Lightning bolts.” Hades observed, studying the brightly burning shards that filled the air with ozone and static energy.

“My weapon of choice.” Zeus assented, and began to walk past him as he spoke. “Not a magic sword that can be broken or dulled by time, but energy, swift and as merciless as any arrow. Far more suiting for a God who will one day hold the name… of Sky Father, and King of the Gods.”

He turned to Hades, and thunder and lightning rumbled and flashed in the ash-laden sky above him.

 _Sky Father…_ Hades bit back a groan of disproval. … _how fucking ridiculous. Mother Rhea has spoiled him rotten. Fed him with mana and nymph hind and the self-centering arrogance that the titan despots rule the world under._

“What else can the others offer that match…the sheer power I will command in the palm of my…”

Zeus stopped in the middle of his boast as his eyes caught the sight of something in Hade’s right hand.

He had seen the scythe.

“Where…where did you get that?” He asked, pointing at it. Suddenly all the bravado of his kingliness disappeared, and in his wild glances up at Hades’s concealed face, for he fell short under Hades’s height by a full inch, and his pointing hand, he had reverted to the persona of a spoilt child wanting what his playmate had.

“How are you holding…that? How long have you been using that?!” He demanded of him.

Hades glimpsed at the weapon, the curved cruel reaping weapon, that helped him fend off and butcher the titans and their demonic broods by the scores, along with the beasts that arose in their black sorcery to prey on the people that the Olympians were meant to protect.

“This?” Hades feigned ignorance under his snarling tone. “I just… picked this up, and it hasn’t left my side since.”

And at the casual deflection, Hades was thankful for the face concealing helm that masked his wry smirk of amusement as Zeus literally sputtered at the ease of which he answered and yet did not answer his urgently pressing question.

“B..but that’s impossible…no-one else can pick up that blade. It was made for Gaia for her son to use, you cannot- but how-”

Hades had heard enough. Hera was taken as prisoner by the Titans, and he would not lose a sister after nearly losing another to this war today.

He lifted the scythe to his shoulder and began to walk past his astonished brother.

“Hera was stolen by Menotieus when she led the charge to Kronos’s sleeping body. We need to move now if our queen and your bride is to live to see the end of this day.”

“Wha-…Hera?!” Zeus’s lapse in memory, be it a lack in focus or the fatigue of war, did not go unnoticed by Hades. But he did not press it with a lash of his tongue. Instead he put his brother to his task.

“Demeter nearly died helping her lead the charge, as did Hestia. Hera must have done so in the hopes of gaining glory for Olympus, and to honour you.” Hades emphasised with a glance behind him.

When he did not hear the crunch of Zeus’s sandals behind him, he did his best to quieten his sigh of irritation.

“This war has gone on for too long and we have lost too many dear to us, in these past ten years of madness.” He turned back at Zeus, who was rooted on the spot.

“We need you today.” He turned around to face him. “The world is about to made anew. Lead us to victory.”

“Ah…yes…Demeter…” Zeus seemed to absorb this with the speed of an ancient sponge. “…yes…I must…”

Something came across the bright god’s eyes that Hades was not entirely sure that he liked. It only added to his suspicions, and his protectiveness over Demeter flared up inside him like fire from dry grass.

_Demeter had been acting strange as of late…_

Meanwhile Zeus stood there, nodding to himself, and his inexperience, despite his position of leadership for the past decade, the result of a soft, sheltered upbringing compared to the hell Hades and his siblings endured in the bowels of Kronos’s belly was immediately telling.

And yet, he was Rhea’s chosen, and favoured by Metis. Hades glared at Zeus long enough so that his eyes met his covered own.

“Stay focused, brother.”

And when he swallowed nervously, all that grandiosity and the shining light of his presence seeming to diminish, Hades racked his brain momentarily for a solution. _Alleviate the situation, perhaps?_

_Or perhaps goad his competitive side?_

He titled his head to the right to the scythe laid on his right shoulder. “If the blade proves to be useless, and your lightning bolts win the day, I’ll toss the cursed thing into the Aegean myself. Unless of course, you are able to take it yourself.”

Zeus’s eyes wishfully glanced at the massive, cruel blade carried so easily in Hades’s hand. Oh yes…he wanted that blade. Since he glanced it and tried to take it for his own, ten years ago, before the titan’s infuriated attack drove them away from Kronos’s body and ignited the ten year war.

If Zeus would not possess something, he would endeavour beyond any sane means to possess it, or unable, prove himself to be greater than the prize. Such was the insufferable way of his great yet fragile ego.

“My bolts, brought to bear as the bringer of the thunder and the lightning…will win the day. You can toss that rusty butcher’s blade into any ocean you like…” He straightened up, and smoothed over his tunic. His bracers on his wrists and his bright, life-coloured eyes shone with power and purpose. “Unless today, I prove worthy of wielding it, as I always am.”

 _We shall see…little brother._ Hades thought darkly to himself.

He began to walk towards the mountain, before a remembrance made him glance to the east.

“Where is Poseidon with his wave?”

Zeus caught up to him, the ground gently shaking under their feet as the cyclops began to follows suit. He could feel him following his glance as he walked alongside him.

“On his way.” He assured with too much ease and assurance. “Summoning a tidal wave large enough to smother a volcano is no small effort, brother.”

“Hmm.” Hades replied. Poseidon. His blustery, thin-skinned and virtuous only in his excessiveness brother, master of the seas and wielder of the Trident had proven unreliable during some of the most critical moments of the war. Lives had been lost due to his easily injured pride, when he proved to be just as egotistical as Zeus did. Both Hades and Poseidon were Zeus’s elders, but while Hades favoured himself as stoic and reserved, Poseidon was boisterous and emotional, prone to his bouts of jealousy and histrionic shows for attention when he was shown to either be a fool, or worse, inept.

And then, there were his affairs, with his lust as tempestuous as the sea and near as insatiable as Zeus’s, as if drawn up in competition. Deep inside, Hades held in the dark corners of his heart a chained, repressed rage, a reminder to never forgive Poseidon, for what he did in a fit of lust and shapeshifting craft to Demeter.

_Shaming the Goddess of Harvest, just to sate his lust, and for what? To create the first immortal horse…_

Hades curled his free hand into a fist and pressed on. There were still several leagues to traverse before they reached the base of the mountain.

“Fortunately, I myself have ensured that I am not found wanting.” Zeus’s voice drew his gaze behind him, as a low, deep rumbling made the ground shudder at a steady, unerring tremble. Turning to look behind him, Hades took a weary step backward as the ground behind him was divided by three gaping holes, each one as immense as a massive lake. The holes yawned wide enough for the rocks and blasted tree stumps to tumble headlong into their cavernous maws.

There were hands. Large, numerous and dextrous, monstrous hands that clawed and dug in their multitude. Hades’s heart leapt as he recognised the hundred hands of the monstrous children of Gaia, once exiled into Tartarus upon their birth for their hideous appearance by Ouranos, now persuaded to aid the usurper of their father’s usurper.

Once the great pits were wide enough, the gargantuan burrowers emerged, larger than the cyclops and imposing enough in their size to rival even the titans. The hunchbacked, hundred armed form of the Hecatonchires rose bellowing low and deep, in the midst of their hunched form, three hideous heads with malformed faces, fused around the neck with eyes like the glowing gems of predators and jaws that opened and lowed with baleful hunger. The burrowing monsters had travelled far to come here, and they were out for blood.

“Hecatonchires!” Zeus bellowed. “Today, we honour your mother Gaia and your sister and my mother Rhea! We storm Mount Othrys, and bring down your titan brethren, who have selfishly reigned in these lands for too long! Honour the vow you swore to me and my mother! Today, you will help me take what is rightfully mine! Forward!”

The multi-limbed behemoths groaned from their three mouths in what sounded like an affirmative tone, and fell in ground-quaking by ground-quaking step behind the cyclops carrying Zeus’s thunderbolts, and behind Zeus and Hades. Their limbs were a mixture of disproportionate sizes, and their large limbs were used to support their bodies, walking on their knuckles as a great ape would. The rest of their hundred smaller ones of varying size and burliness dangled from their shoulders or clutched and scratched at their hideous faces as they shuffled after them.

Ahead, as they crossed the vast distance, Hades could hear the sounds of battle. Brutish roars and the sound of footsteps like booming, distant drums echoed throughout the valley overshadowed by the erupting volcano. Drums upon drums, their echoes resounded along with the pounding of the crude staffs of the Titans against the mountainside.

“The Gigantes have engaged the Titans.” Hades explained. A loud crash soon afterwards suggested that a body had fallen. A giant or a titan, he could not tell.

“Those rapine, unwashed barbarians…” Zeus spat. “If any of them survive and they insist on more than what we agreed to pay them…”

“There is a vast vein of gold and tunnels full of precious metals in the depths of Elysian.” Hades assured Zeus. “They will be more than sufficiently compensated.”

“Well it better be-“ Zeus was interrupted by another rumbling crash, followed by a chorus of yells and the booming laugh of what could only be a monstrous titan in the short distance.

Hades looked up to see that before them, a veil of dust had been stirred up by the crashing feet and bodies of giants. Then, through the dust, huge, armoured bodies came stumbling out, some of them limping while one carried the other. Alyconeus carried one of his brethren, who was bleeding from his dented helmet.

The Gigantes were retreating on their own accord, defying Hades’s orders.

“Where are you going?!” Hades growled up at them and pointed with his scythe to beyond the fog. “Get back to the front!”

“It’s Menoetieus!” Porphyrion from under his tusked helmet cried out, recognisable only by his distinctly tinged purplish pale skin his cracked black armour, holding his limp right arm to his side and favouring a leg with a twisted ankle. “Doom and Might! He squashed three of our brothers and tossed us around while dangling Hera in front of us!”

“No goddess or pretty woman is worth going up against that bastard!” Alyconeus cursed, all his lecherous resolve at the prospect of getting his hands on Hera completely abandoned.

“Come back!” Zeus belted out, heedless as the giants limped past him, stumbling and dropping their crudely forged weapons clattering to the earth. “Stop, in the name of Gaia, I command you, or face my wrath.”

And when he was ignored, he turned to the closed cyclops with bent pointed ears.

“Steropes! Bolt, now!”

Hades growled to himself, then turned the issue of subordination from their minds. Their punishments would have to come later.

“Let them go, brother. They are not worth your energy.” Hades turned to Zeus, but his brother ignored him as he strode towards Steropes, who was distracted trying to dodge the smaller giants. Behind them, the hulking hecatonchires glanced down and hissed menacingly at the nusiances scattering past their several knuckled hands and their pair of legs.

Zeus reached for a bolt.

“ZEUS!” A loud, proud boisterous voice echoed from beyond the dust cloud, and all froze at the voice.

“Zeus!” came the voice again, after a heartbeat of silence. “I know you’re there…tiny little god! Come out! I have your pretty queen! She’s right here! And she wants to see you! Zeus!”

Hades looked back at Zeus, who turned slowly, and began to storm through the cloud, the broken cracked earth crunching under his sandals.

Hades followed, as did the cyclops and the monsters behind him.

Hades had to squint to see through the thick layer of dust, lifting a hand to shield his eyes again, and when finally he passed the layer, the giant bodies following suit behind him, the sight before him rooted him to the spot.

It was a sight that Hades had thought he had prepared himself for, ten years to the day since he was spewed back to the world of the living from Kronos’s mouth, yet right here and now, all he could feel, was the mortifying, immobilising fear that he felt, and saw in his worst nightmares, ever since he was a boy. Ever since he grew as a child in the darkness of Kronos’s belly, and beyond into manhood.

And every night since.

They had arrived at the foot of the imposing mountain. The peak was obscured by a layer of clouds, no doubt a strategic action performed by the titans and their sorcery. Prometheus, Epimetheus and Atlas and the rest of their monstrous brethren were concealed from view, and there would only two titans, two titans that Hades could see.

The first was Menotieus himself, Doom and Might, with a bald head sporting proud but sharp features on his face, with large piercing eyes a gory mixture of bloodshot molten amber. His pale-skinned and soot covered body was bare, sporting a scarred torso of rippling muscle and pectorals. His entire body bore scars and bite marks and other ghastly scars, exposed everywhere save a loincloth made from the stitched leather of several hundred cows. In his dirty hand with grubby fingers sporting broken nails, he held a small woman dressed in white by the hands in his right enormous fist, loitering on the slopes of the mountain.

The second was a body so immense that it nearly matched the span of the base of the great mountain. Its body was like that of a man, but Hades could see its ribcage poking from its side, and its muscles had shrunk with atrophy from ten years of inaction. Its head was bald, scarred, and scored with many open and poorly healed cuts across the scalp. The work of scavengers who believed the sleeping titan to be dead, perhaps. Its face was turned away from him, and Hades was somewhat thankful.

But even the beast’s face obscured from him did nothing to stop the flash of memories that began to assail his mind.

Visions of teeth and darkness and the screams of babies, echoing in the cavernous, stinking, rotting depths, and the chittering hisses of unmentionable beings scuttling down the tunnels towards him…

Hades clenched his teeth. Clenched his fist. Clenched the handle of the scythe so hard the wood might very well shatter if not for the enchantments that bound it for its bloody purpose. He closed his eyes. Tried to breathe. Tried to banish the memories and the helpless fear that imposed him

But even those were not enough to stop the violent shakes that began to overtake him.

_Stop…just…stop…_

_“Hades! Hades, help us!”_

_“Mummy! I waa my Mummy!”_

_“Hades, help!”_

_Stop it!_ Hades tried to tell himself, tried to banish this memory, this nightmare with his words, as if they ever made a difference. _Just stop! I got out! We all got out! I’m not there! I’m not here._

_But then he was there. In the dark, stinking tunnels. The air close and dank and poison yet somehow, he was breathing it. Breathing hard and fast because he was running, his feet fighting for traction on the slippery ground beneath him._

_A ghost of a howling, gibbering horror was chasing him. There were no gall stones or stones or tree branches that Kronos had swallowed in his foraging. He was alone. Demeter was screaming and Poseidon was wailing somewhere while Hestia was trying to calm him. Hera would not stop screaming her lungs out, screaming until her throat went raw and she began to vomit._

_He slipped on mucus and slowly fermenting shit, soaked up into his elbows, his naked body covered in blood. And with a rattling howl, the twitching beast was on him ripping into his back. His weak, boy’s back, not the back of a man. It pushed him into the sludge, claws and feelers biting and teeth snapping away,_

_I’m not there anymore. I got out! I got out! I didn’t die then! I got out!_

_But no-one came to help. No-one arrived and hit the beast off him like they did then. The quivering, formless, biting, hissing mass just bit into his back and he could feel it begin to eat into him and break his tiny ribs as it burrowed for his kidneys._

_I got out! I got out! Stop!_

_I got out!_

_I GOT OUT!_

***

“Menoetius…you made a great mistake laying hands on my queen.” Zeus hissed. “He will pay. They all will! And we’ll be the ones to end this war, together, right, Hades?”

Hades, standing behind him to his right, did not respond.

“Hades?”

Zeus turned to glance at his brother, already feeling irritation rise inside him when his brother did not echo him. What he saw however gave him pause.

Hades was just… standing there, whispering something to himself. As still as death, even. His red glowing eyes squeezed shut and his horned, ornate helmet looking down at the ground. Yet not all of him was like that of a statue. His fist was quivering, and his chest under his cuirass rose and fell shakily when he breathed.

Zeus strained his ears above the rumbling volcano and the roars of the nearby titans, and through the noise of the world coming asunder, he could hear Hades whispering something to himself.

“..m not there…’m not there…’m not there anymore…”

_Ah…wonderful._

_This again._

It always irked Zeus when this happened.

Truly, elder brother or not, it wasn’t very becoming of his older brother, this absolute bore of a man, who was a stoic, cheerless nag to be so preoccupied by fleeting fancies of his own mind. One of the nymphs he laid with…couldn’t remember the name, said something about wounds of the mind that plagued the soul. Wounds caused by deeds or evil actions that were inflicted on a man so badly that it forever changed the mind of the afflicted.

What a load of absolute pig-shit.

No man, if he could call himself a man, would let such childish things as nightmares or bad memories afflict his sound body and judgement. It had not gone unnoticed by Zeus that all his five brothers and sisters seemed a bit touched as a result of spending their growing lives and youth in the stomach and intestines of his titan father. And Hades was perhaps the most afflicted.

For all his talk of leadership and his council, his hand in the strategies that, admittedly played their part in their victories, and his recklessness in battle that somehow always won the day, Hades seemed to be lacking, or falling just short of the mark of manhood that would make Zeus consider him a true threat to his rule. Certainly, Hades’s advice and behaviour had been a form of…cohesion amongst the siblings, keeping them in check and uniting them by a presence, that while quiet, was certain, sober, and dare Zeus admit it, grounded even. Ideal for the newly fledged gods freshly regurgitated from the mouth of a titan in need of leadership.

But Hades had his failings, and Zeus carried in his mind the proud knowledge, told to him and assured by him again and again by Rhea and his tutor Metis, that he was the leader of the Olympians. Not Hades. Not the blustering, self-occupied fool Poseidon, and Ouranos help him if any of the women were placed in charge. Pah! Not them, but him, and him alone!

The damaging, sheltered and understandably traumatic life of avoiding being consumed by Kronos’s stomach and its denizens, if they even actually existed, was, while admirable, inhibiting, detrimental, and rendered those who experienced such an upbringing as unsuitable for the rank of kings. Zeus was raised by the finest women, fed on the finest foods and upraised and lavished by the finest stock of servant in all his needs. He was raised, no, born for the title of Sky Father and King of the Gods.

And Hades with his brooding, and his sore attitude and his biting sarcasm, coupled with these, these, frankly…pathetic childish breakdowns, by Gaia…

He would never make a good king, let alone a lord of anything. And woe be to his subjects if he took any form of regal power.

 _Perhaps when I have sons of my own_ , Zeus thought to himself _, I will have my own company of real men to entertain me instead of my idiot fat brother and this boorish fool that I’ve had to put up with for ten years._

_And if not I am destined to swing the sickle, then perhaps one of my own. And through him I would be glorified. Nothing would be beyond my power. Nothing would be beyond my reach as the one true god and lord of all!_

_There would be the issue of finding a means to…procure that fine, bloody weapon from my elder brother…but, time will tell._

For now though, Zeus chose to focus on the present. He turned away from his brother, a mumbling distraction.

Today would be a glorious day.

Today, the titans would pay for their treachery. Kronos will finally be dealt with, and he will finally rule over all of Heaven and Earth!

Now, to the first matter at hand.

“Zeus!” Menoetieus’s hideous, blood-orange eyes appeared to perk up as he saw him approach. “I though you would never have the stones to finally show! I was expecting your brother, hells, even the fat one with the trident, but now I have the scourge and the rebel leader in front of me, and their greatest price…”

Menoetius lifted Hera. Her head with her braided hair tied in an elegant bun, hung limply in front of her. She appeared intact, for the moment.

“It would be such a shame if anything were to come of this fiery little bird. She proved quite a nuisance when she loosened her arrows at me, before I snapped it like a toothpick!”

“You will unhand her, Menoetius, or suffer the consequences of defying your future king!” Zeus threatened with a deep voice that echoed across the mountainside.

“Defy a future king…oh…” Menoetius, clearly lying, raised his scarred eyebrows in a show of consideration. “My, my…that does sound like a serious offence. Why, treason against the king is punishable only by a very bloody punishment. What was it now…oooh yes, pulled apart by horses. Yes, yes…a very serious one indeed.”

Menoetius lifted his free hand and scratched at his chin, another act to mock him. Zeus bristled at the slight the oafish, muscle bound titan dealt him, with every second that he wasted taunting him and holding his future queen hostage.

“Hmm…ah!” Blood-fire eyes shooting open as if arriving at a revelation, he pointed a finger to the sky, opening his mouth wide to reveal jagged, broken fangs where teeth should be. “There’s just one problem! There’s not a single bloody horse, let alone a herd of them big enough to pull me apart. And there isn’t a bloody rope, big enough or strong enough to bind me, a Titan!”

The Hecantonchires growled with impatience behind him, and the Cyclops shifted on their feet behind, snorting from their nostrils. Restless and bloodthirsty. Good. They were of the same mind as he in wanting an end to this boastful cretin.

“If anyone is defying a king, little Zeus, it is you! The leader of the rebel gods, the lesser race of immortals below the titans, made to be our servants, had Father Kronos, slumbering here, did not swallow the lot of you at birth! Father Kronos is king! Not you!” Menoetius bellowed, shaking Hera like a doll in his hand.

“Do not worry, tiny little brat Zeus.” The titan continued. “When we defeat and capture you, my brothers will spare the horses. We’ll do the dirty work ourselves, drink all your blood,vand keep a piece of you in our lodgings, one each to ourselves. And then, as we admire your remains in our days of wining and whoring, we’ll look back and laugh, at how one little gnat who fancied himself a god, decided to-”

Zeus decided he had had enough. If anyone was being an irritable gnat, it was the thug titan who brazenly sought to shame him before his own men, his own brother and the rest of his titan brood. Ignoring the loud booming voice of Menoetius, tuning it out of his mind, he unslung and dropped his Aegis shield from his wrist to the ground, discarding it like a broken trinket. He turned his head slightly in the direction of Steropes behind him.

“Steropes, be so good as to hand me a lightning bolt. I wish to test its range and effectiveness.”

Behind him, he heard shuffling as Hades appeared to snap out of his mumbling state. About damn time too.

“Brother, wait, you are about to use an untested weapon. Even if you were to succeed, Hera will still be in danger

“She’s a goddess. I’m sure she’s been through worse in this war.” Zeus said dismissively as Steropes clumsily handed a bolt to him from the bundle he carried.

He took a moment to inspect it, running his hand along the flat service of the steadily glowing, softly humming bolt in his hands. The bolt was two feet longer than he was tall, with an impressive girth that tapered in the middle for his right hand to wrap his fingers around the middle. Days upon days the cyclops had spent crafting his fine weapons, hammering away at the bolt to seal it in an envelope of solidified photon plasma, designed to shatter and detonate its contents upon impact after being hurled with sufficient force. The lightning within the bolt was compressed into a single jagged sliver of barely contained electronic energy.

He won’t miss. He would never miss. He was the king of the gods after all, raised to be none other than the best. “She’ll understand and forgive me this injury, and Gaia help her if she doesn’t. Even more so if she so much as falls short in her gratitude towards me for saving her life.”

“Zeus, you cannot mean to…” Hades stepped forward.

Just then, an eerie trilling call sounded through the air, and Zeus glanced up, as did Hades.

Flapping through the air with gentle strokes of her wings, Hestia came to them in her bird form, a grey winged crane with a narrow straight bill and an elegant, thin neck. Stretching out her long stalk-like legs, she landed with a patter of her three-toed feet splaying out in the dirt, before bowing and, with a gentle flash of light, transformed back into her human form, her avian body morphing into that of the armoured, sandy-haired Goddess of the Hearth.

“Any sign of her?” Hestia asked, brushing the side of her hair past her ear, looking at both of them for answers. Supple and a bit on the fleshy side, but Zeus preferred his women lither and less…homely in appearance. Still, Hestia had her uses, building her little fires to warm the hearts of the men who fought by their side and telling her stories and keeping the army’s morale high wherever she went and so forth. Hard to see her catching the eye of a man with the way she dressed in heavy robes and her tiaras and gemstones and her obsession with hearthfires, but, who was he to judge other men’s appetites.

But for now…

“Hestia, just the woman. As you said, Hera is being held by Menoetius still. You see her there?” Zeus pointed a hand to the titan still mouthing off like the imbecile he was.

Hestia glanced up. “Gaia’s breath…She lives?”

“For the moment.” Zeus tossed his lightning bolt with a casual air into his right and best throwing arm. “Take form as the Crane again. When Menoetius falls, you will fly up and catch her.”

Zeus awaited Hestia’s response as he began to prepare his throw. Perhaps this form of spear throwing should become a sport. If and when he made people, perhaps he would make them play this sort of game to honour him. Throwing spears at targets, at trees, at each other, makes no difference to him.

“You…How will Menoetius…?”

Hades spared him the waste of energy in having to explain it to her.

“Zeus is going to try to shoot Menoetius with his lightning bolt. When he falls, you need to be ready to catch Hera. Can you do it?”

_Really, Hades? The concern is unnecessary. You prove as soft as any woman under that armour and that joyless demeanour._

Hestia let out a slow, steady breath, before answering Hades.

“Been a while since I carried a Goddess. Never too late to practice, eh?”

“That’s the spirit, Hestia.” Zeus replied, lifting his bolt up like a spear, marking the point of Menoetius’s head with its sharp jagged bolt. “And after today, we will have no need to battle for our right to rule ever again. You can go back to your pretty fires and lecturing your nymphs on the virtues of the life of a home-dwelling busybody, or the merits of a spinster. I, meanwhile, will be enjoying the view from my throne as a king, and living as such a life demands.”

Zeus continued to aim, using his finger to assist in his aim. He almost didn’t notice Hestia speaking as he felt the excitement begin to build in his stomach, a giddying, budding excitement that once again he was about to surpass himself and add yet another legend to keep himself feared and toasted and the nymph’s legs parted.

“Yes, well…lucky for the both of us, I happen to care for Hera as well.” Hestia’s voice taking on a hard edge did not go unnoticed. “Would be a shame if my bird legs decided they weren’t strong enough to carry Hera. All that lithe muscle she’s built up over the years with that bow, fighting and bleeding for you so that you could earn your throne all to yourself.”

 _You never have it in you._ Zeus wanted to say, but he wasn’t in the mood to bandy words with the Goddess of Hospitality and her homely moralising lectures.

Instead he replied.

“There is no greater cause.” He refused to take Hestia’s passive-aggressive bait, or feel any regret for his actions and words. Such weakness was not the way of a king.

“Fly low.” There was the small sound of armour scraping and leather rustling as Hades moved behind him to address Hestia. “Try not to attract-”

“It’s alright, Hades. This isn’t my first time dancing in fair and foul weather on Gaia’s breath.” Hestia assured him. The sound of shimmering crystals filled the air, and a soft hoot told Zeus that Hestia had transformed into her crane form again.

“Right then.” Zeus decided. Now was the time.

He began to walk, crunching across the dry, cracked, burnt earth before him. Fire from the volcano had already blackened and scorched the land, rendering it lifeless and possibly barren. Much of the land bore the scars of the conflict that had raged for the past ten whole years to this day. Zeus had counted, but with the Olympian’s help, that would all change. The world would be made anew and he would rule as the world’s saviour and its benefactor, to be feared as deeply as he would be loved. He would make it so.

He stopped, beginning to feed his own power of lightning into the bolt he carried. The bolt was forged to contain an additional surge of power, and many mountains and forests bore the scars of his earlier tests of how much destruction a charged bolt could cause.

Now, he would see how much it would do to the head of a titan.

“Oh…What is this?” Menoetius took notice of his advancement, leaning forward and squinting with his eyes, holding Hera like a rag doll by her hands still. She shook like a strand of grass in his grip, but did not stir.

“You’re stepping up like a big little man to face me! I never thought you had the gonads, for such a tiny little man.” Menoetius cocked his head and flashed Zeus his hideous, cracked teeth.

“Tell me, pampered prince, did all that nymph pussy make you soft in the head? I hear too much of that can make a man as tender as a girl. Or maybe it’s the men? Do they have satyrs on Crete, little Zeus? Goatmen with ugly faces and swinging cocks that might go for a pretty boy like yourself!”

Zeus stopped. He only needed to get a little closer in order to make sure that he would not miss.

“There’s no shame in being a boy-lover, little Zeus! Or was all that chest-pounding you’ve been doing the past ten years a way to make up for taking it up the arse like the bearded boy-lover you are!”

 _After today, there will be no question or mockery over who I prefer as my bedmate._ Zeus began to lift and aim his lightning bolt. _Men, women…all will practically beg for the privilege._

As Zeus placed his right leg back, poising his right arm behind him to throw, using his left hand to aim at Menoetius’s head, the titan grimaced, scowling with his ugly, Gaia-forsaken brow and features to appear more bestial and terrifying than before.

“So you think you can beat me with a single little shard of lightning? Well then, perhaps you need another lesson. Perhaps…” He glanced down at Hera, shaking her like a rattle, her head and limbs flailing about limply in his captivity. “…I will demonstrate your punishment right now on your pretty queen here, and pull her limbs off one at a time, unless you call off those abominations and those one-eyed freaks, and march home back to your island to suckle on your dead goat’s teats!”

Zeus pointed with his left finger at Menoetius’s forehead. Inhaled, slowly. Felt his partially bare chest under his toga rise, and fall, as he exhaled.

_I am…nothing else…but the best._

And with that, he shuffled forward, throw his right side forward and hurled the shimmering lightning bolt straight from his hand.

The bolt shot through the air with a buzzing, droning whistle.

Menoetius opened his mouth to speak, but his amber-mottled red eyes opened wide with actual realisation, followed by a look of horror as the bolt streaked across the air, shot past his up-raised hand that he lifted too late-

-And with a flash of pure, brilliant light, and the crack of thunder a mere second later, followed by a small shockwave, Menoetius’s head exploded in a gory fountain of blood and bone, with courses of electric energy unleashed from the confines of the bolt rippling across the geyser of blood fountaining from his incinerated neck, burning at the rim of its truncated stump.

As the echoe of the explosion reverberated across the entire mountain and valley, Menoetius lolled, swaying slowly on his feet. His right hand dropped, and opened. There was a flash of silver white as Hestia’s crane form swooped in from behind Menoetius and low, streaking towards the now-falling body of Hera.

The shockwave swept across the land and Zeus and his party. He only felt the mildest disturbance as the wind blasted softly through his robe and threw his shoulder-length locks behind his head, flattening his moustache and beard against his face.

Zeus tracked the falling body of Hera, and a small sense of relief bloomed in his chest as Hestia matched her speed, reached out her stilt-like legs and crasped her by the shoulders. A feat impossible for any ordinary crane, Hestia flapped her wings and flew on, past the heads of the Hecatonchires and beyond, wisely returning to Demeter and the forces.

Good. This is true god’s work.

Menoetius swayed, his limbs now slackening like a broken toy. Then his knees gave, and he fell forward, collapsing to the slopes of the mountain like a massive tree. His headless body crashed against the blackened stone with a wave of dust from the impact. His huge corpse, smoking at the neck, bounced only once, before sliding several metres down, and coming to a rest, shrouded by the dust awoken from his fall.

_Nothing…but the best._

Zeus felt it. Felt it running, coursing through his veins as sure as lightning. This was it! This was the final moment! The moment of victory was at hand! Ten long bloody years having led up to this moment!

He turned with fire in his eyes to the three cyclopes.

“Steropes, I will reward you with whatever titan, giant or woman you desire, as well as your brothers for this. Stake the rest of the bolts into the earth, then go up into the skies and summon the storm!”

The cyclops nodded and with tentative care, he began to lift and jam the bolts into the earth. Zeus looked up at the Hecatonchires.

“Hecatonchires! Move up the mountain. Gather as many rocks in your limbs as you can, and carry one in each hand, all one-hundred of them. We’re going to batter them off the mountain and stop them using its magma against us! Do this for me, and I will consider a better place for you and your talents in this world than Tartarus!”

The hulking, bulky monstrosities looked down at him, and opened their malformed mouths on each of their groteseque faces to rumble a bellow in reply. Each face and head and arm bore horrific scars or places where flesh was missing or burned off. Life in Tartarus had been anything but gentle to the most hideous of Gaia’s children, having been cast there by Ouranos himself.

He turned to the mountain, feeling the storm rise up in his blood as it rumbled ominously before him. A burning peak spewing hellfire like a hideous boil, spewing its corruption on the earth, begging him to conquer it. Rivulets of lightining crackled from his elbows, his shoulders, down to his fingertips.

_Yes…yes…Yes! Today, the world and the heavens and all within and inbetween and beyond will be mine! All of it will be mine!_

He turned to his own monstrosities, that he would singlehandedly lead to victory and use to cast down other monstrosities.

“Cyclops, Hecatonchires! Atta-”

Zeus was halted by another rumble, so deep and mighty that it made him stumble on his feet, swaying like a drunkard. Trying to contain his shock, he steadied himself and frantically searched around for the cause. Was the Volcano’s blood about to breach from another fissure in the land and melt more of the earth in its path?

But as the earth stirred and rumbled and groaned, shaking in its terrible, unstable fury, Zeus looked in front of him and realised with mounting, unbelieving horror that it was not the volcano.

For, moving his emaciated arms, and shuffling his narrow, tree-trunk legs, pressing all his gangly but still mighty limbs against the barren earth, a wave of dust spiralling at every movement of his immense body, pushing his hands into the earth to begin to stand, naked, gaunt and hideous to all creation…

…was none other than the hateful, fear-stricken tyrant lord of the universe.

To Zeus’s revulsion, as the lean, starving Titan began to rise higher and higher as he stood to full height, it had strands of black hair that blew in the wind. His ribcage pressed against the flesh of his massive torso like many fingered-fists pushing through pig-skin. A ghostly wisp of a moustache, of some form of hair under his cut nostrils and chin, blew limply in the air as Kronos began to stand so tall that his head cleared the layer of ash and cloud that obscured the peak of Mount Othrys. His gangly limbs hung limp with lean, protruding muscle defining his narrow limbs.

But his eyes…Gaia’s teats…his eyes…

They were white, and glowing, and his teeth…

“No…” Zeus could only say to himself. “No...!”

_Damn you, Demeter! Damn you for being right! Damn Gaia and all her knowledge of this wretched earth!_

But what Gaia through Demeter had spoken, had come to pass.

Standing before them, his teeth like a grisly, grinning horror made manifest, of a man if he were made a savage, cannibalistic beast, snarling down at them with a mixture of malice and savage hunger, was no other than the slumbering Titan.

Kronos had awoken.

His eyes blinked like feral beastly eyes caught in the firelight. His chapped, scarred lips, partially eaten and chewed by the multitude of scavengers brave enough to come near it, peeled back to reveal his yellow and brown fangs.

And then he spoke. And it was a rumbling, grating snarl that made all of Zeus’s hair stand on end. He could even hear the Hecatonchires shuffle back slightly, and the cyclops grunt to each other as they bore witness to the horror before them.

“I hear thunder….I smell blood…” His voice echoed louder than Menoetius’s voice or death ever could. “I hear fire…I smell…treachery!”

His last word was a roar, made by the titan bending down, curling his grasping fingers into fists, breathing in and yelling it so loudly that it made his own voice grow hoarse and raspy.

Zeus stumbled again, the wind of fetid breath blasting against him with such force that he nearly fell on one of his own erected lightning bolts.

And he cried out. Damn it all to Tartarus, he turned away, lifted his hands, and in an unguarded movement, lost all of his bravado and courage all at once.

And like the little boy he was when he first met his father.

Zeus cowered before the Titan Lord Kronos and his imposing hatred.

Strong enough to devour his own children as his malevolent scream ripped away all reality and blotted out the roar of the volcano altogether.

***

_“Hades?”_

_Hades was kneeling, his right knee to the ground, as well as his right fist. His left hand rested on his upraised knee._

_The fountain in Rhea’s courtyard trickled, and shone like liquid diamond in the sunlight._

_Hades was looking at the mosaic floor. The sun shone also into the sheltered alcove, illuminating the soft blue hues mixed with brick-coloured red amidst the brown, earthy hued and square cut stones inlaid into the floor._

_“I wanted to talk to you…just you.”_

_“What did you want to know, Mother?” He eventually asked._

_He heard only her footsteps, bare and soft against the hard floor, softly brushing and padding towards the back wall, where a shelf lay in front of her. He heard the scrape of ceramic as she lifted the jug to pour herself a goblet of nectar._

_“How…” She began, before deciding to take a small sip of her nectar._

_Hearing her gulp down the sweet fermented brew, Hades’s heart darkened. Kronos’s abuse had turned her to drink. She did this much, and too often, for Hades’s liking._

_But for the love he bore her, and for what she had endured, he held his tongue, as he heard her fingers drum against the cup with a soft, decisive beat._

_“How did you survive? Down there…inside Kronos’s stomach.” She finally asked. “Inside him…with in there, with the dark things chasing you.”_

_Another gulp._

_“Your brother, Poseidon, walks away from me the moment I ask. Hera grows distant…just staring off into space. Hestia conjures a fire and cradles it, fretting over it like she’s afraid it will go out. And Demeter…Demeter just starts shaking…”_

_Hades’s heart panged at the sound of Rhea’s voice breaking, followed by another sip and a brief sniffling sound._

_“How…” She spoke, and sniffed to clear her nose, before trying again with lengthy pauses in-between. “How did you manage…to keep them safe?”_

_Hades felt the compulsion to open his mouth, but for some reason, his lips and his tongue failed him. He remained as silent as a stone._

_Then he heard the sound of skin sliding against the floor as Rhea turned, and began to walk towards him. Hades felt conscious now. He was bare at the waist, as he wanted to go swimming. Dive deep into the dark embrace of the lagoon without being interrupted by Poseidon’s fucking water games, before one of Rhea’s nymphs summoned him._

_It meant that he felt vulnerable. And worse, it meant that Rhea could see his scars._

_Hades jumped slightly as a cool, soft, and long- nailed hand glided over his shoulders._

_“I’m sorry…You have so many scars…my first-born son…my little boy…and you have scars…”_

_Hades reacted on impulse, because Rhea’s voice began to break again. He lifted his right hand and without looking, caught her left hand. Her fingers curled around his as he rubbed the top of her hand and squeezed it to reassure her._   
  


_Her hand was wrinkled, soft and small in his own._

_“I am so sorry…” She sniffled, no matter how hard he squeezed. “I wish I could have stopped him. I wish I did.”_

_Another shaky breath._

_“I wish I left when I saw him for what he was, the moment I suspected. But I love…I loved…your father…and it made me weak…hesitant to do the right thing. Had I not acted sooner…”_

_Her hand gently tugged at his, and he let go, lowering his hand to the ground._

_Her next question took him off guard. But it was one that he, with Hestia’s forewarning beforehand, had anticipated._

_“Do you hate me?”_

_Hades blinked, and in forming his reply, took to idly brushing the small stones from the tiled floor with his fingers. Calloused, hardened fingers._

_A seagull shrieked nearby. He could also hear the shrieks of laughter from the beach. Demeter and Hestia were playing with the nymphs in the sea. Safe. Warm. Happy._

_It warmed his heart, somewhat, to hear that noise._

_He inhaled, and slowly breathed out, before he answered._

_“How could I hate one who I barely knew.” He spoke._

_“For all I know…the hellish pit of Father’s belly, was the womb, that I was trapped in.” He clarified. “All I see…in my nightmares, taste, feel…is the cold rush of air burning my lungs and then the hot stinking air of Kronos, as he lifted me to his jaws, and swallowed me.”_

_The shrieks of Demeter and Hestia were once shrieks of horror. Fear that would have smothered any joy in their lives, since their infancy, to their late adolescent days inside the pit of Kronos’s stomach, had Zeus not rescued them._

_“ From darkness I was born…and into darkness, I returned.”_

_Rhea was silent, and so Hades, unhindered, and yet unwilling to look her in the eye, continued._

_“When I was a child, I followed only my fear, and foraged for whatever Father swallowed in his guts. I ran when I could and hid when I could, and survived, however I could._

_A hard swallow, and another breath of the fresh air, each one making the memory of the poisonous, smothering, close air of Kronos’s guts more and more distant with every breath._

_“But my brother and sisters did the same, and no-one came down to defend them. No one being from outside came to rip open Father’s stomach and free us from his clutches.”_

_He turned his right hand to look at it. Criss-crossed with hard lines and cuts across the palm and fingers. Wresting open fanged snapping jaws. He could remember almost each encounter by the depth and width of each cut._

_“So one day…on my sixth year, I saw my siblings, your children, surrounded by…unnameable horrors, and found a long splinter from a tree that Father had swallowed, lying before me.”_

_He closed his hand into a fist._

_“It was then that I realised, that I would likely live all my life here, and die, in that stinking hellhole. I could try and escape, but the shadows and the darkness, fetid and sick…I would have wandered forever in the bowels of the monster, until death, or the monsters took me.”_

_“So all I could do, and the only thing I could do…was fight. Fight, because I had no other option. Fight, because it kept me alive for one more day that passed us in the countless years we spent down there.”_

_“And so I picked up the splinter…tested its sharp edge with my finger, sharp like the claws and fangs of those things that bit at us and hunted us in the dark, and in my mind, I heard only one voice._

_“One voice, that defied all instinct inside me to flee and hide as I did before.”_

_“Abandon all reason. Abandon all fear.”_

_“Kill everything in front of me.”_


	4. Not Story Content- Do people actually want this to continue?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this isn’t story content. Just needed to be honest about something.
> 
> TW: strong language, mention of performative allyship, possibly depressing moping rant ahead.

Hi.   
  
First of all I apologise that this isn’t a story chapter.   
  
I’m writing because I have run out of inspiration and have slipped into a state of procrastination and lack of motivation. I don’t know exactly why this state has come about but there may be a few contributing factors at play.   
  
My country- the uk- has gone into lockdown again because people are stupid and valued money and business more than they did their own lives.   
  
Secondly, I may be feeling fatigue from the effort I put into the previous chapters and having recently deleted my game of thrones story that I have no intention to finish, my motivation is at a low as I fear that despite my hard work, not enough people will read or support my work.   
  
so, to avoid a repeat of events, please could readers share this story to tumblr pages and fan websites if and when they can. I can’t write anymore if I don’t receive my inspiration and support from my audience.   
  


Otherwise this story will be deleted and the overall project cancelled. I’m not wasting time and effort for something people aren’t going to read.   
  


That is all. Thank you for your patience and understanding.   
  


Defiant Candle.   
  


edit- 12/11/20

Ok I feel the need to provide further context to new fans of this and my writing in general.   
  
  


My lack of inspiration is due also to a state of burnout, the reason for which I will explain below. For context, I am a white cis-gender straight able bodied 27 year old man, which might add further explanation beyond what my words might convey. 

I got into seriously writing fan fiction during the ending of Game of Thrones when due to my own severe loneliness I chose to project onto and obsess over Jon and Daenerys as a couple. Believing that fans might be interested in my own fantastical take on the dark fantasy series and inspired by my own childish need to re-write and insert elements of my own, I threw everything I could into the work, and became manically obsessed with the idea of bringing my vision to life.

The plot and overall theme was the idea of a high fantasy multiverse that involved the seemingly eternal struggle between Daenerys, who was in fact a dragon goddess from the moon, and R’hllor, the Lord of Light who gives his followers the flaming sword known as the Lightbringer was reimagined as the Satan of the multiverse. I looked into the idea of reincarnation and the Ramayana with the theme of a loving noble couple, a god and his lover versus a malevolent entity with Rama, Sita and Ravana.   
  
It wasn’t the only element of inspiration but it comes to mind when I think of the things that inspired it. The theme of an unlikely hero freeing the beautiful but unhappy lover of a dark being also resonated with me and in turn fuelled my work.

In this case, Dany was to be the chosen one, while Jon was to be her protector and guardian while R’hllor, a shadowy demon lord through fate was to be her arch-nemesis who would try and at times succeed in seducing her or leading her to destruction.  
Curiously though, Jon ended up being her prince with Dany being the damsel and doing most of the heavy lifting, while Dany in my incarnations became a demi-goddess warrior queen with two voices in her head that were meant to be the souls of two Targaryen Ancestor Queens in one story and then a anti-heroine dark knight in the other. The dragons were intelligent psychic reptile dogs in dragon form, everyone cared about honour and morality and bad guys got what they deserved. Complete unlike GOT at all.  
  
My ideas were fuelled by delusion and were in short bat shit crazy, like something out of a fantasy cartoon like Avatar. They were my own self-insertions and projections that completely ignored the tone and feel for Game of Thrones. My stubborn support and blind defence about the book series and show that victimised women, eliminated POC characters or reduced them to side lined, servile roles and was otherwise just plain fucking depressing did nothing to help.

In addition, and I completely understand if I get hate for this- there really is no point to obsessing over and creating your own version of a story when no matter what you do, nothing can change what has happened in canon. It is too much like the definition of insanity. (He says at the start of his Hades and Persephone fan fiction)   
  


Game of Thrones did, for all its many sins expand my mind about what it means to create a compelling fantasy universe, and I spent a whole year of my life spending money on books and films to research and conceive and improve my own writing. My obsession with Daenerys, or rather my projected version of Daenerys maintained, yet for all my hard work and devotion to my series, my works did not receive the attention I felt it deserved. In many ways now, I suppose I am glad they didn’t. 

My stories were over the top, unrealistic and at times, grossly misinformed and otherwise, just plain shit. I’m glad I deleted them as I would struggle to justify the absolute bullshit I came up with writing fan fiction for a show that I feel now did not deserve my love.

\- side note- for those of you who wanted to see finished the story ‘No Words Are Needed’ about the modern au about Jon falling in love with a deaf Daenerys, I am sorry, but I cannot bring myself to complete it. Looking back it was clearly a case of too much in too little a package and the characters and scenarios were completely unrealistic.

I am sorry but like my other incomplete stories, it is done. For the deaf community or those who knew deaf people and enjoyed this story, I am very truly sorry, but for the sake of my own mental health, I had to put an end to it.

Cancel and unfollow me if that is what you wish. My own complete lack of experience with deaf people as an able bodied person who never closely knew anyone who was deaf may lead you to deem the story an act of performative ally ship or support for deaf and hard of hearing representation that I stopped when things became too difficult for me to continue, and you would be right. If I cared more or perhaps put more effort into my research, it would have been finished by now. I wanted to create a sweet romance story with a twist that was different from the usual wholesome romantic aus, being inspired by another GOT AU work, that for complete bullshit reasons didn’t come to pass. 

Even when I tried to reincarnate my version of Jon and Dany into my own series, it fell completely short. The characters themselves though enjoyable were problematic and not the most fun or enthralling. Jon is ok but he can be just, bland and boring as the de facto good guy. Great for me wanting to self insert myself into his shoes but not as compelling as other characters or protagonists in fantasy stories. 

Daenerys is, no matter how many times you put a spin on it, written to be a white saviour who her empire’s former darker skinned enemies end up bowing and scraping to just because she has three dragons she can barely control. She didn’t even have a fancy psychic bond with them like Eragon or even have kick ass fire powers like a dragon might!

I added the psychic part in my stories being inspired by another fanfic author, who I will not name, as despite their story heavily inspiring me, they did nothing to support or read any of what I had to offer. My stories may have been shit, but they lied to my face and deflected with being occupied by their own work when I asked them to read my work. Spiteful for me to say as it is, if they cared, they would have found the time to read and offer feedback to my work, but they never did. 

Ok so by now you’re probably thinking I’m up my own ass, and that’s true, and but I won’t apologise for saying that Daenerys could have been way more compelling and better written in the books and the show, but I digress.

I’ve fallen into this state, possibly due to excesses in my life and busyness at work and the stress of these times during a goddamned pandemic, or it could be that part of me has given up on writing altogether. It may also be due to the fact that this website wanted little to nothing to do with what I had to offer before, which is why I felt the need to write this. What you just read more or less accurate summary of what I put myself through.   
  


Writing has inspired me to take a journey to learn more about myself, history, and other contemporary long-standing issues like anti-racism, representation, LGTBQA+ issues and feminism, but it has also severely fucked me up and quite damn near broken me. That’s the honest truth.

  
I’ve been horrifically inconsistent and atrocious to my own fans and the friends I made and for that I apologise. In a depraved act of self-centredness, I even cut ties with an artist who commissioned a couple of art pieces for me because they very reasonably objected to me trying to share one of their works without their permission to Emilia Clarke herself, during a time when an idiotic infatuation I had with her grew out of control.  
  


But this is the truth, as pathetically honest as it is. I’m a piece of work and barely anyone I know outside this writing life knows what I’ve been through and what I’ve done. I wanted to at least be accountable for what I wanted to do, did do and didn’t do, before going forward.   
  


So if any of you weren’t repulsed by this loner creep living at home with his parents during lockdown wasting a chapter moping about his lack of inspiration, and somehow don’t consider me another one of the worst parts of 2020 and want to see me write more, then, say so if you please and share and share with others who might be interested and I may consider it. I hope this has provided context behind my current struggle, as this is the most honest I’ve ever been and if it is Too Much Info then I apologise.   
  
Thank you for your time. I do have an instagram account under the same name on which I occasionally post updates.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think? I'd love to say my piece as it were on this well-loved couple and develop this to a longer story at some point!
> 
> Leave a kudos and if you want, a nice review if you liked it?


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